Day: November 21, 2006

One email I’d LOVE to get is Gina Trapani asking to join my network. She does LifeHacker, which is on my short list to get into our network. Oh, heck, Gina is on Jason Calacanis’ list too! Damn, Nick Denton better be giving her big bucks with all this competition to grab her away.

I can’t promise a link. Hell, I can’t even promise I’ll answer the email (I’m only answering one out of 20 emails lately). But, I do read every email and I do consider it, even if only for five seconds.

To earn a link, though, I’d like to see more than just a couple of posts and I’d like to make sure that they add some value for my readers.

What’s tougher than getting a link? Getting me to subscribe. If you get me to subscribe it’s far better than earning a link. Why? Cause then you’ll get on my link blog over and over.

When you watch my videos of SOASTA, a startup in Silicon Valley that’s building an automated Web testing tool (pretty cool, too) you’ll notice that every employee has a 30-inch Apple monitor on their desks. That isn’t all. They also bought every employee two computers: one a MacPro and another a MacBookPro. But even more, they bought everyone a 30-inch monitor for use at home with their MacBookPro.

I asked founder Ken Gardner why he did that and he said he noticed he was a lot more productive when using a 30-inch monitor and he wanted every bit of productivity he could get out his employees so he bought them all two too.

It made me want to work for Ken. And it’s not the only visionary thing he’s done with his company, either. They took the interface from Apple’s Garage Band and put it on enterprise software.

The third Photowalking is now up on ScobleShow. Part II is here. This is actually not a “walking” one, but we sit down in my home office (Thomas says it’s my mansion, but it really isn’t) with Jan Kabili, who produces the excellent Photoshop Online TV and has written a ton of popular Photoshop books. She teaches Thomas a whole bunch of things about Adobe Photshop and how to use it to make your photography better (the techniques discussed will work with pretty much any photo editing tool). If you’re using a digital SLR, this is one hour that’ll make your photo workflow a lot better.

UPDATE: Congrats to Flickr on adding a new feature today where you can see what camera made the images you’re looking at. That’ll come in useful. But I wonder if it’ll properly track the camera that Flickr’s community manager was using today (Heather Champ was using a Polariod).

His answer? That the people he’s interested in reaching (the younger, more tech hip generation) will watch Internet video.

We talk about a variety of other things about what Seagate is trying to do.

Is this an advertisement? Yes. But it’s not like any advertisement I’ve seen on the Internet or on main stream TV.

“This is not your daddy’s disk drive company,” he says.

Some excerpts:

* Seagate had a tough time getting funding back in 1980. Why? The VCs thought no one would want to buy a 5MB hard drive.
* The way Seagate made their new 750GB drive (largest in the industry) is to stand the magnets on end, like a forest of trees, instead of laying them down like has always been done.
* They are going to go beyond just magnetic storage in future generations to build multi-terabyte drives by heating up and cooling the media to enable even tighter storage.
* Seagate is shipping new kinds of storage devices for Windows Vista that combine hard drives and Flash memory, which will speed up the boot time.
* Every TV in the world will have a hard disk on it, or around it, he says.
* “It’s amazing what shit for brains we have in this industry,” he says, when talking about the standards fight between BlueRay and HD-DVD.
* They sell hard drives into Sony’s cameras (and PlayStation 3 too).
* He wants Seagate to help facilitate content distribution. Putting all movies from, say, a movie studio and put them on a hard drive.
* He says he doesn’t shut down his PC and explains why toward the end of the video.

Sorry about the audio on me (you can hear Bill just fine, but hearing me is a bit tough). This should be the last interview that gets up that was done with one microphone (I’m getting much better about using two microphones).

He’s pretty outspoken for a CEO, among the most interesting of all the CEOs I’ve interviewed.